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Here is the release announcement:

I’m happy to announce the release of my first Free eBook — Linux 101 Hacks. There are total of 101 hacks in this book that will help you build a strong foundation in Linux. All the hacks in this book are explained with appropriate Linux command examples that are easy to follow.

You can download the book from the author’s blog.

You can download Wine 1.0 source code here; or you might want to wait for your distro’s update, I believe they all will update very soon!

So, here we go:

1. Follow the official instruction to install all the restricted formats:

   sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

2. Install MPlayer:

   sudo apt-get install mplayer

3. Download MPlayer binary codecs package from here.
4. Install MPlayer binary codecs package: (Note: the package name may differ from yours.)

   tar xjvf essential-20071007.tar.bz2
   sudo mkdir /usr/lib/codecs
   sudo cp essential-20071007/* /usr/lib/codecs
   

At this point, you should be able to play rmvb files now. In case you still can’t, install libstdc++5 as follow:

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

Bonus: I highly recommend you to give SMPlayer a try. You can get SMPlayer by:

sudo apt-get install smplayer

I installed Hardy in my Lenovo Y410 half an hour ago. Most hardware (monitor, video card, wireless card, wireless mouse, webcam, etc.) work out of box, but like 7.10, the sound card still requires some efforts to make it work. In software, Gimp is upgraded to 2.4.5, OpenOffice.org now is in version 2.4 and Firefox 3 beta 5 is installed as default.

A lot of improvements, but pretty much no excitements for me (Firefox 3 can be counted as a “Wow”, but I’m using it at work everyday, so…). I’m kind of disappointed tonight. However, I heard that Hardy has a feature which lets user to install this Linux distro on top of Windows; this could be interesting, but I haven’t gotten chance to try it yet.

Cool, so I attempted to try it out, but…

When I clicked the “Choose photos and videos” link in the upload page, I got a very long and very ugly popup window in Gnome! See below:

IMAGE IS MISSING, SORRY!

You can tell even just from this thumbnail that this window is abnormally long; and YES, my screen (19”, 1440×900) can’t display it as a whole because its width is 1556 pixels. Even worse, I can’t resize the window!

We can see the problem here: The file-type bar is too long. It’s trying to show all the file types that are available. It is fine in most of the time, but it obviously is a flaw. I call it a BUG, you might want to call it an UX (User Experience) problem, either way…

Well, how’s Windows? Let’s take a look:

IMAGE IS MISSING, SORRY!

Much better! The window size is normal, my laptop (14.1”, 1280×800) can handle it with no problems. When you move your mouse pointer over the file-type bar, it will then give you the full list through help text.

Personally, I use Linux with Gnome at home and I am happy 99% of the time. I saw the huge improvements that desktop Linux has been made so far; however, I can’t deny that there still is a long way to go for this badass ;)

I was scared so I even actually checked top three’s homepages and the result was even more scaring: they DO exist!

What the heck is going on here? Where is Ubuntu? Where is Debian? I couldn’t believe my eyes! I was totally confused.

So I decided to blog this. But after I’d taken the screenshots, I suddenly realized: Oh, today is APRIL 1st!

LOL~ Nice trick, DistroWatch!

However, in my current assignment, I have to use a makefile provided by the prof. and there are dependency cycles among classes. The following is a simplified class digram shows the relationship:

IMAGE IS MISSING, SORRY!

I screwed up the header files; I spent almost one hour to solve it. I tried a lot different combinations of #includes and forward declarations, but none of them satisfied the preprocessor and/or the compiler.

After I became tired, I decided to leave the keyboard alone. I picked up my pen and a piece of paper and drew a small class diagram like the one above but much uglier. Suddenly, I found the problem guy was the class B because it had two outgoing dependencies and one incoming. Say that B’s dependencies count (dc[B]) = outgoing – incoming = 1, and dc[A] = -1, dc[C] = 0. The greater the number is, the class has more problems.

The problem is clear. Satisfying C’s dependency is a piece of cake, I just need to forward declare class A in class C’s header, c.h, then I include c.h header in b.h. Since the declaration of A is in c.h, I don’t need to declare it again in B’s header. Then, I include b.h into class A’s header file a.h.

Done! I’m not sure the program would work correctly, but now, it can be compiled.

Now I can imagine how hard the problem could be if hundreds or thousands files/classes are there sitting with cycles; therefore, the original design is so important and I believe that’s why we have to take tons of design/software engineering courses in the university.

Because the Linux kernel has already supported any BCM43xx wireless card, the only thing you need to make Linksys WPC54GS wireless card work under Debian 4.0 is its firmwares.

You can download the firmwares here and extract them to a directory, say ~/tmp/bcmfw, then, as root, do

# mkdir /lib/firmware; cp ~/tmp/bcmfw/* /lib/firmware
# modprobe bcm43xx

After you reboot your Debian box (this step maybe unnecessary), WPC54GS should be able to see the access points. Enjoy your wireless network!

If you want to extract the firmwares yourself, the first tool you need is bcm43xx-fwcutter. You can install it by

# apt-get install bcm43xx-fwcutter

The next thing you need is bcmwl5.sys. Typically, the file can be found in the wireless card’s Windows driver. If you cannot find yours, you can download mine here. Say you put the file in ~/tmp/bcmfw, then

# bcm43xx-fwcutter bcmwl5.sys

Now, you should have all that you need. Follow the above steps, copy firmwares to the right place, then you’re good to go.

The excitement comes from the new Compiz and all the new upgrades and features, the disappointment comes from the support to Chinese language.

I love beautiful desktop effects, but I have to admit that, for me, the eye candy stuff only has a little influence to the regular use of computer. On the other hand, the Chinese support plays an important role: I need to read and write Chinese in order to communicate with my family and friends, most of them don’t know English at all.

When I was in the age of 6.10 and 7.04, I found that the Chinese support was smooth and sweet; all things were setup by just few mouse clicks. But it is not true at this time. After I installed this fresh guy and enabled the Chinese support, I could read only “some” Chinese at the beginning, there were lots of characters were missing on Chinese web pages and SCIM (input method) was not functional properly (in the way it worked in 7.04), so I couldn’t type Chinese in Firefox.

It is frustrating!

Solving the missing characters problem is easy. I just installed an open source Chinese font, WenQuanYi Zen Hei (really good one, highly recommended!), into my system, then the problem was gone. Unfortunately, the SCIM problem is not that easy. I tried several different solutions I could find on Internet, but none of them was working, so I almost gave up. Lucky enough, my last try saved my life. I switched the default language to be English (United States of America) — the previous one is English (Canada) — SCIM then was working in the way I expected.

Now, I get everything working nicely, but it took me one night or more to figure all the tricks out. It’s kind of wasting of time, a desktop operating system should NOT work in this fashion.